Monday, April 22, 2019
roblem ith eading eros
Ia erohedge:
Omebody orgot to heck he 'ext' ormat for the Ip Ode olumn of a preadsheet.
Seriously, this is a perpetual problem that has NEVER been solved in any proper intrinsic way. When you want to sort a list of numbers, or alphabetize filenames, you always have to fill with leading zeros so every item has the same column structure.
All other major products have rigorous standards for usability, typically via the ISO organization. Software never acquired standards.
If we had ISO for software, this would be one of the requirements. Any program that handles a list MUST orthogonalize the columns, or give you the choice** of orthogonalizing.
A couple other needed standards:
When a login has the choice of 'remember me', the 'remember me' should always be ticked by default.
Every search function should use whole words by default, so you don't get a thousand different words that happen to contain the sequence of letters you enter. Searching for 'of' shouldn't yield off and coffee and software and loft and Boffo and Hofbrauhaus and ....
A popup with several choices should always step through the choices by Tab. Some popups work this way, some force you to step with arrow, some don't have any keystroke. This irregularity gets in the way of smooth workflow, especially when different popups inside the same program use different stepping methods. You think you chose SAVE but you actually chose DON'T SAVE.
= = = = =
** This spreadsheet is actually DE-orthogonalizing. Zip codes are orthogonal and non-numeric by nature. Each column is occupied by digits that represent regions. The digits could just as well be letters, as in the Canadian or British postal codes. The spreadsheet tried to treat them as regular numbers by truncating the leaders.
Seriously, this is a perpetual problem that has NEVER been solved in any proper intrinsic way. When you want to sort a list of numbers, or alphabetize filenames, you always have to fill with leading zeros so every item has the same column structure.
All other major products have rigorous standards for usability, typically via the ISO organization. Software never acquired standards.
If we had ISO for software, this would be one of the requirements. Any program that handles a list MUST orthogonalize the columns, or give you the choice** of orthogonalizing.
A couple other needed standards:
When a login has the choice of 'remember me', the 'remember me' should always be ticked by default.
Every search function should use whole words by default, so you don't get a thousand different words that happen to contain the sequence of letters you enter. Searching for 'of' shouldn't yield off and coffee and software and loft and Boffo and Hofbrauhaus and ....
A popup with several choices should always step through the choices by Tab. Some popups work this way, some force you to step with arrow, some don't have any keystroke. This irregularity gets in the way of smooth workflow, especially when different popups inside the same program use different stepping methods. You think you chose SAVE but you actually chose DON'T SAVE.
= = = = =
** This spreadsheet is actually DE-orthogonalizing. Zip codes are orthogonal and non-numeric by nature. Each column is occupied by digits that represent regions. The digits could just as well be letters, as in the Canadian or British postal codes. The spreadsheet tried to treat them as regular numbers by truncating the leaders.Labels: Entertainment, Real World Math
¶ 1:41 AM
